Nathaniel Braddock

CHICAGO’S OCCIDENTAL BROTHERS DANCE
Band International play a blend of West African
palm wine and highlife, Congolese music, and
jazz. Guitarist and bandleader Nathaniel Braddock
still chuckles at the band’s name, a twist
on the vintage Nigerian highlife act Oriental
Brothers. Braddock’s Ghanaian collaborators—
vocalist and trumpet player Kofi Cromwell and
drummer Asamoah Rambo—played in a popular
’90s highlife band called Western
Diamonds. So “Occidental” covers the African
players’ roots in western Ghana, and the American
players’ roots in the other West.

“I started the band around 2006 as a side
project,” explains Braddock, who also plays in
the Ancient Greeks, the Zincs, the Butcher Shop
Quartet, and Chicago Javanese Gamelan. “Most
of my performance had been in indie rock and
the experimental scene.” Braddock had studied
classical guitar while in school in Midlands,
Michigan, but his tastes soon ran to Led Zeppelin,
Blue Oyster Cult, and then the Sex Pistols,
Sonic Youth, the Smiths, the Pixies, and—
Afropop? Braddock became fascinated with the
public radio program Afropop Worldwide, in particular
an early episode called “Guitar Greats,”
which he can still recite portions of from memory.
“Me and my brother were kind of odd men
out in Midlands,” recalls Braddock. “We were
always looking beyond what was immediately
available and African music caught my ear and
became a path for me.” That path led to Chicago,
and a teaching gig at the Old Town School of
Folk Music. After Braddock was nudged into
offering an African guitar class, his students
said they wanted to hear the music, so he put
a band together and booked some gigs.

During the years between the band’s self-
titled 2006 debut and its 2008 Odo Sanbra CD,
the Ghanaian members joined, and Braddock
made his first visit to Africa. He had picked
up some Ghanaian highlife and palm wine
picking along the way, but when he sat down
with the Western Diamond Band’s former
guitarist Anthony Akablay in Ghana, a deeper
education began. “Aka studied with a lot of
the great old players, such as Konimo and
King Onyina,” says Braddock. “I think he even
worked a little with Kwaw Mensah, who is
really the starting point for Ghanaian guitar.”
Mensah picked up guitar in the early 1900s,
probably from the Kru, Sierra Leonean sailors
who worked on Portuguese ships and disseminated
guitar music to African port cities.
Mensa’s kwaw is a fingerpicking style that
generally moves between two chords—typically
Em and F—and it established the basis
of palm wine and highlife music.

Palm wine evolved to include other variants,
notably Yaa Amponsah, which started
as a praise song to the woman who carried
the palm wine from the bush to the bar. “If
you’re playing a Yaa Amponsah song it’s like
saying you’re playing a blues,” says Braddock.
“It becomes a style, with certain conventions,
harmonic progressions, and
rhythms.” The basic chord progression is II7-
IV-V. Braddock plays a nice variant in C:
C-C7-Dm/F6-C-Dm/F6-Gsus-G-C. Of course,
the real trick is the rhythm. “It’s close to what
they call ‘3/2 clave’ in Caribbean music,” says
Braddock. “But if you are an American guitarist
and you’ve done some fingerstyle
playing, it’s confusing because the role of the
thumb is very different: You don’t play on
the one. You are on all these off beats and
in-between beats. The thing I’ve learned by
listening and working with people is that part
of playing rhythmically in this style is about
muting—left-hand muting and right-hand
muting. Rhythm is not just where a note
starts. If you don’t end it in the right place,
you’re not playing the right rhythm.”

Braddock still prefers picking on nylon
strings, but he teaches using a $300 Blue
Ridge steel-string. When it comes to electric,
he’s recorded with his ’54 Gibson ES-125
archtop, but on stage prefers his old Fender
Telecaster, customized with over-wound Lindy
Fralin pickups. Braddock has thick nails on
his picking fingers, and favors heavier strings.
“I’m using GHS Boomer strings gauged .012-
.050s with a flatwound G string right now,”
he says. “For me, the string has got to push
back a little. It needs to have a lot of character,
or else you can’t play the complicated
rhythms. Even when flat-picking with .011s,
it was just falling apart.” Braddock’s stage
amp is a Carr Rambler. “Fender Twins are
great,” he says. “But they are too loud for a
festival stage. We use a lot of dynamics, and
we have acoustic instruments such as upright
bass, alto sax, and trumpet. The Twin doesn’t
wake up until the volume is set on 2 or
3, and then it’s too much.”

The Occidental Brothers are likely the
only U.S. band to specialize in classic Ghanaian
and Congolese styles. At a time when
this older music is scarcely played anymore
in Africa, Braddock and his musicians are
evolving it, creating new hybrids with other
dance styles and jazz. As the crowd stepped
out recently at Lincoln Center’s Midsummer
Night’s Swing, it was clear that
Braddock’s “side project” has legs. His real
African adventure may be just beginning.